We think we know the sound of country music: a fiddle that weeps, a guitar that snaps, a steel that slides from one note to the next. But that sound didn't just fall from the sky one fine morning: it was built, piece by piece, over more than a century, by hands that never stopped importing, tinkering, electrifying, and reinventing. Country doesn't have one sound: it has a toolbox that has only kept growing and changing, generation after generation.

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So this journey unfolds in chronological order. It begins back when country music did not yet exist, when its entire set of instruments was acoustic and came from elsewhere: the fiddle from the British Isles, the banjo from Africa, the accordion from Germany, the steel from Hawaii. A veritable map of the world, set down on a Southern porch.

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Then comes the first record, in 1922, and everything speeds up. To cut through the din of dance halls and barrooms, musicians chase volume: they lodge metal cones inside guitars, then plug them in. The guitar turns cutting, the steel begins to weep under its pedals, the drum kit forces open the doors that had been shut to it. Each decade brings its own break with the past: the big band of western swing, the stripped-down sound of bluegrass, the velvet of Nashville, the grit of Bakersfield, and soon the machines that replace the musicians.

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For this is the secret thread of the whole story: with each new tool, country music asks itself all over again what it is. The electric guitar, the drum kit, studio strings, the drum machine: every one of them was suspect at first, accused of betraying the soul of the genre, before becoming, in turn, a classic. The debate between tradition and modernity is no accident in country music: it is its driving force.

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And because the West has no borders, this is the story of a great melting pot: African rhythm in the fiddler's bow, Black blues in the cry of the Telecaster, gospel in the vocal harmonies, hip-hop in today's beat. In every era, country has borrowed from those no one expected, and it is often the forgotten who handed it its finest instruments.

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From the gourd of an enslaved man to the drum machine in a Nashville, Tennessee, studio, here, then, are a hundred years of instrument-making: the story of everything country music has held in its hands to say three chords and the truth.

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✦ This series is meant to be read in order, from start to finish, but each instrument portrait also stands on its own. Follow the thread of the century, or the thread of your own curiosity.